I worry sometimes like I gave away all my power, and I have no idea how to claim it back.
I put so much into the hands of others, giving them the reins to steer my emotions, my decisions, what I do with my life and daily interactions. I choose to do this, because I’m too scared to make my own decisions. Why? Because I don’t know what the right decision is, and how to find that answer.
The thing is, there are no answers. There is no universal truth. All we have at our disposal is rhetoric derived from personal experience, the ways of the world as seen through the eyes of each individual who enters the conversation.
So why, then, do I lean so heavily on the opinions of others? When their experience is so vastly different from my own, why do I look to them for guidance in how I should run my life?
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because I don’t trust myself to always do the right thing. I don’t trust other people, either, but that’s a given. It’s normal to be let down by others. It’s scary to be let down by myself, because that means having to look in the mirror and accept that either I’m not in complete control of myself, or that I am in control and actively choosing to say and do things that don’t align with my own values.
To be completely honest, I feel sometimes like I’m just a horrible, unpleasant person. There are days, like today, when I really get down hard on myself. Those days are difficult to handle, because the cruelty I subject myself to in my own internal criticism is shocking. It makes me want to stay away from other people forever, for fear that I may end up treating them the way I treat myself in self-reflection.
This avoidance of intimacy, of course, makes it far worse, because it removes the sources of support and positive feedback that can continue on even when the loop inside my head gets stuck on the negative setting.
Right now, I’m feeling lonelier than ever. I’ve managed to isolate myself to the point where I’m not sure if I’ll ever recover. I joke about being a forest witch, but I wonder if I will end up just being alone, forever. If once I cease to be useful, once my friendship no longer becomes something people can use for rapport or leverage, if they will all drop off and fade away. If my failure to maintain the genuine friendships I have will result in them giving up, because I struggle to stay in touch and show that I care.
There are too many places where I can no longer go and groups I can no longer be a part of because I had a disagreement with somebody, and couldn’t resolve it. It’s so painfully uncomfortable to deal with that sense of rejection, of not being liked by a person, of imagining that they and everybody else surrounding them have decided I’m an awful person, that I almost always run away. I choose to cut them out of my life and avoid the situation forever because it just doesn’t seem possible for me to engage in those difficult conversations and come out feeling like something has been accomplished. Those conversations almost always end with me feeling like I’ve been bowled over, like I had to roll over and just submit to what the other person wants, like I don’t have the ability to adequately express myself without it sounding as if I’m attacking. So often I’ve been accused of being a horrible, nasty person, I’ve begun to just believe it. Maybe I am. Maybe I really am incapable of loving people, and thus, of loving myself.
So often I’m comforted by these frank analyses of my own psyche; awareness is the first step, they say. Well. I don’t often take large strides forward after that initial first step. This just brings me up to the line where the event begins. To truly begin the journey towards healing my deepest wounds, bettering my relationship with others, and really digging in to self love, I have to step over that line. All this writing, all this autobiographical psychoanalysis? That’s the equivalent of a runner pacing back and forth behind the starting block, stretching out their legs, jogging in place, and taking deep breaths… All to avoid actually running the race.
Someday, I’ll have to do it.
